Glenn Collins

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Glenn Collins is a columnist for the Dining section of The New York Times, where he has written stories on everything from Hong Kong restaurants and Las Vegas noshing to the Mangalitsa-pig fad and the uproarious swan song of the bankrupt Tavern on the Green.

Before he came to the Dining section in 2009, he was a reporter in the Metropolitan section for 15 years, writing investigative stories, profiles and features on the eccentric foibles of New York. For five years he reported from ground zero, chronicling the terrorist attacks, their impact on the lives of victims’ families, and the intricacies of the ambitious reconstruction. After writing 48 of the “Portraits of Grief,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily vignettes commemorating those who perished in the World Trade Center, he was invited to speak about the project to 1,500 victims of terrorism at the Second International Victims’ Congress in Bogota, Colombia.

From 1994 to 1997, Mr. Collins wrote for the Business section about warring national restaurant chains and the eternal struggle between Coca-Cola and Pepsico, as well as the spate of class-action lawsuits against tobacco companies, bringing to Page One many exclusive revelations about the secrets hidden in manufacturers’ research files and corporate records.

Before that, from 1989 to 1994, Mr. Collins was a writer in the Arts section, reporting on museums, cultural institutions and movies that were filming in New York City. He also served as the theater reporter, writing profiles, breaking news and covering the annual Tony Awards. He profiled everyone from Jeanne Moreau and Bette Davis to Robin Williams and even Donald Duck on his 50th birthday, who was referred to as “Mr. Duck,” conforming to New York Times style.

From 1988 to 1989, Mr. Collins was a member of the national Lifestyles team, a pod of reporters assigned to track trends, phenomena and fads.

From 1980 to 1988, Mr. Collins was a reporter for the Living section, the Home section and the daily Style pages. In addition to writing stories on chefs and restaurants, he worked as a society reporter, often covering luxe events in tuxedo; he also traveled the country writing about American families and the rise of family therapy and research.

Starting in the early 1980s until the present, Mr. Collins has also been The Times’s premier (and pretty much only) circus reporter, writing more than 100 circus stories that included, on Page One, the aerial marriage of two trapeze artists and the achievement of the first documented quadruple somersault. He wrote decades of stories on the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the Big Apple Circus and other shows, including a New York Times Magazine cover story on the Moscow Circus and its failed quest for a quintuple somersault that was never completed.

Mr. Collins was an editor at The New York Times Magazine from 1970 to 1980, and from 1973 to 1977 presided over a weekly bylined Times Magazine column, Endpaper, where he edited the works of such writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Donald Barthelme, Joyce Carol Oates and Jules Feiffer. In 1972, he wrote the magazine’s cover story on the construction of the World Trade Center, thus becoming possibly the only reporter who — having stood atop the towers before they opened — subsequently walked in the depths of the “bathtub,” the pit that marked the location of the Trade Center after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Before coming to The Times in 1970, Mr. Collins was an editor at the Columbia University Forum and a reporter for the Paterson Morning Call. He also worked at the Associated Press to help pay for college at New York University and graduate school at Columbia University. He lives in Upper Montclair, N.J., with his wife, Sarah, and has two sons, a grandson and a granddaughter.